Curatorial Park Tour

Today was an amazing day! Colleen, the museum curator, took all of the interns and museum techs on a curatorial tour of Yellowstone. We started in Mammoth at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, where Colleen discussed the other hotels that had been located on and near the site of the current hotel. She also discussed some preservation issues that the museum and park must deal with. The first has to do with the park's historic furniture, much of which is in use in the hotels. This constant use of cataloged museum collections brings about several preservation and other issues. For example, the furniture is constantly moved by the hotel, which makes it hard to keep track of. 

The concessionaire, Xanterra, also runs a wood shop where they are constantly repairing, reupholstering, and repainting the furniture. The repainting especially caused problems in the past, because the museum's catalog numbers were being covered up with paint, making them impossible to keep track of. Xanterra and the museum came up with a solution - they put electronic chips in the furniture so they can be scanned during inventory. 

Another issue is one of light - the hotels have lots of windows and that means lots of sunlight, which has damaged a considerable number of irreplaceable objects. One example is a wooden map designed by Robert Reamer, an architect who designed many of the hotels in the park. The map now hangs in the Mammoth Hot Springs hotel. It has considerable sun damage, and has faded a great deal over the years. 

Our next stop was the Museum of the National Park Ranger in Norris. The museum is quite small and is located in an old Army building. The exhibits document the roles of park rangers over the years and the museum is staffed by volunteer park rangers who have retired. Colleen explained that the HRC has to take all the objects out the museum for the winters because the museum has a mouse and bug problem that they do not want to compromise the objects.   

After leaving the Museum of the National Park Ranger, we went to the site of a hotel that was built in Norris, but burned down before it ever opened when someone started a fire in an unfinished fireplace. We were able to see where a chimney once stood and there were ceramic sherds scattered around the site. Colleen showed us a picture of the hotel before it burned down.

The fireplace of the ill-fated hotel in Norris

From there, we headed to the Norris Museum in the Norris Geyser Basin. Interestingly, this museum was built with funding by one of the Rockefellers to the American Association of Museums, who used the money to build this and three other rustic museums in Yellowstone in the 1930's. This museum has exhibits on the geothermic features in the park.

Norris Museum

From Norris, we went to the Fishing Bridge Museum, in the Yellowstone Lake area. This museum was built with the same funding as the Norris Museum, and the exhibits focus on lake ecology. I had already been to this museum to fix the bird exhibits (see post from June 12). Colleen explained that this museum looks almost exactly as it did when it was built, with the same exhibits and same cases. 

Fishing Bridge Museum

Exhibits in Fishing Bridge Museum

From Fishing Bridge, we went to the Lake Hotel, the oldest hotel in the park. After having lunch in the dining room (which was awesome!) Colleen described the history of the hotel and its changes over the years. She showed us historic photos and also showed us how they use the scanner to inventory the furniture with the embedded computer chips, which was really interesting. Outside the hotel, Colleen pointed out a yellow bus, a historic vehicle that was tracked down after being sold, restored, and is now used as it once was - as a tour bus. The HRC has three of these yellow buses in its collection, and eight others are used by Xanterra for tours.

Lake Hotel

Sunroom of Lake Hotel

Yellow Bus

Our last stop was the Old Faithful Inn, where we learned the history of the Inn, got ice cream, and watched Old Faithful erupt. From there, we headed back to Mammoth having learned much more about the park and its history than when we started. 

Old Faithful from the deck of Old Faithful Inn